those from 1950 and 1951, also have a Klee-like whimsy and narrative inven- tion: the Cézanne outlines bump and collide and apologize to each other. One wonderful drawing from 1951 has, in abstract form, all the awkward comedy of Guston's late pictures; a little roller-coaster car of pears ap- proaches a vertical outline that looks vaguely like a woman's body seen in profile, and then the pears seem to col- lapse into each other from sheer embar- rassment. But for the most part Gus- ton's abstract drawings look terribly dated now; they have a "period" quali- ty, and seem curiously passive and claustrophobic. Still, Guston stuck to abstraction, and the era buoyed him up. What is striking in the series of drawings that Guston made in 1966-67, and which are generally held to herald his decisive repudiation of his abstract style, is not how "real" they look but how uncrowded. Drawings like "Wave II" and "Mark"-each a single gestural line-seem to signal not so much a return to figuration as a desire for emptiness. The problem that Guston faced in the mid-sixties is often represented as a choice between continuing in a her- metic style that had cut itself off from the world and trying to reattach him- self to life, but the truth seems very different. Older artists often need private styles, and abstraction had by then become irrevocably public. When Matisse, in the late forties, wanted a private style, he turned to abstraction precisely because it seemed to offer something monastic, removed, inti- mate. But by 1966 abstraction had become the official style of a rich and abundant culture, and to use it was inevitably to comment on history, not on experience. And, in any event, the much talked-about return to figuration is a false issue-one of those phe- nomena, like the "return to classic tailoring" in men's clothing, that seem to happen every other year. M ORE important than any return to figuration was the kind of figuration that Guston returned to. The cartoon style that he eventually settled on looks familiar, and suggests some half-remembered Depression comic strip-a crudely drawn world of cold-water apartments, skinny, hairy legs, and upturned, Chaplinesque shoe soles It's a style that summons up /, 1ß/ If' 'í(((f(( ltllf(/(( ( / ( / It l 1./ /1 / 1/ /- @ // -- \ - 1,"" -- /' I) \ __ --- L F} 1;__ / li){O ___ (at]b ,, /'0{ ' 99 C7- ir-- 1 L__ f Q 8:28: Charles stood up and strode into the kitchen. Everything was in readiness. He selected a fresh piece of stone-ground whole- wheat bread and balanced it carelessly in his left hand. Behind him the electric wall clock hummed quzetly. The peanut butter spread easily across the bread, Charles expertly turning the knife this way and that, guiding the creamy paste around the surface. The grape jelly proved more of a challenge, but he was equal to it. At precisely 8:30, he settled back into his chair, back into his reverie, back into the doubleheader. . the cartoon's speed and brio only to slow it down, and subject it to entropy. Everything in this world is running down and growing old. The cross- hatchings that stand for shadow read just as easily as stubble, so that the whole world seems covered with five- o'clock shadow. One way of describing this world is to say that it looks a lot like the world of R. Crumb, and the resemblance be- tween Crumb's world and Guston's is so strong that it inevitably turns up in discussions of Guston's transforma- tion. Dabrowski, in her essay, repro- duces a cover from a Crumb Comix of the late sixties. Most critics treat the resemblance as one between an essen- tially anonymous popular style and a high style in transition, but in fact Crumb and Guston were both revival- ists, and independently fell into the same style at the same time. The first Crumb cartoons that look like Guston . drawings date from precisely the same period-the mid-sixties-as the first Guston drawings that look like Crumb cartoons. Both men were in rebellion against the public style of their medium-Gus- ton against the cheerful largesse of triumphant abstraction, Crumb against the phonyness of commercial entertain- ment-and they adapted a style that had been invented by George Her- riman in the nineteen -twenties, in his illustrations for the Don Marquis "archy" poems. By 1966, it was in no possible sense a popular style. It had died, and been buried, and it had to be consciously revived in much the same way (though for radically different ends) that, say, Roy Lichtenstein re- vived Art Deco design at the same time. Crumb, like Hogarth or Gillray, whom he very much resembles, is in some ways a more scabrously original